


As If A Magic Lantern

by Jo Robbins (plenilune)



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Community: rt_challenge, Developing Relationship, Dual Narrators, F/M, Ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-04
Updated: 2007-08-04
Packaged: 2017-10-04 15:17:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plenilune/pseuds/Jo%20Robbins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is trying to learn her by heart. Remus and Tonks navigate their changing relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As If A Magic Lantern

> _It is impossible to say just what I mean! __  
> But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen..._  
> \- T. S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'
> 
> _   
> _

**i.**

   He is trying to learn her by heart.

   He watches her move through grace and awkwardness; here her wrist curves in a way that makes him catch his breath, and all of the lines in her align, and then she has struck the spout of the teapot against the cup and the liquid’s gone over the table and she is laughing, and mopping it up with the end of her scarf, and when she pours again the tea curving out of the spout and her wrist curving over the cup are mirror images and he must be the only one who ever notices these things about her.

   He has known her since she was a small madcap child forcing storybooks into his hand, and he is still making sense of her, and she is harder to make sense out of when she is novel and startling in his new views of her. Here, she falls over the last stair when she comes down them too fast and twists her ankle and sits up and _laughs_; here she is reading the _Daily Prophet_, eyes snapping black with fury, and then she is crying, and ranting something about injustice and politics in a thick, compressed voice; here she is being told about a family killed in this war-that-is-not-a-war, and she is very white and her eyes are very bright like holes burnt through her face and she doesn’t say anything at all.

   And here she is kissing him very firmly and gently and insistently and tenderly and whispering that the world is not ending, do not go gentle into that good night (she’s been reading his books).

   She shifts, like the turn of a kaleidoscope, and he does not understand her, but he is unsteady with startling love.

 

**ii.**

   So this is how Remus takes his tea: a long, careful steep; a dash of sugar; cream, not milk. She watches and takes notes in her head. She has never watched him quite like this before; imagine, he’s made tea in front of her for years and she never thought to figure out how he did it.

   Well, she’s going to be making his tea for the rest of her life – oh yes, she’s decided this, and she thinks he has too even if he isn’t telling her – so she ought to know what to do.

   She is taking notes and falling in love a bit more irrevocably with every one.

   He wears a battered crimson jumper half of the autumn and winter; his wrists stick out of it. He tends to run a hand through his hair, and sit, with his palm pressed to his brow, when he is puzzled or worried or sometimes when he doesn’t want her to see that he is laughing. He chews on the ends of his pens and there are always ink-stains on the sides of his fingers. When he is reading he curls into a chair, drawing his knees up, and he is thirteen years older than her but when she sees him like that she can’t help but see the little boy he must have been once.

   They talk about the morning’s news and when he is angry about it, because they are both angry about it most of the time, his voice goes very low and terrible and there is something behind his eyes, like a torch at the front of a legion.

   When she kisses him he tastes of longing, and he holds her very close as if he might be afraid of her slipping away and into the night, and he always looks faintly surprised, and his hands, on her face, in her hair, are very warm, and a little rough, but in the winter they are cold and she holds them between hers.

   She is in love with all of the scattered bits of him, the idiosyncrasies and the way his hair quirks up and how he tangles his hands in her hair when he kisses her and the way his voice sounds when he is reading Eliot and the faces he makes when he is pretending that the toast she has made him is not actually burnt through, and she is dizzy with it.

   To think she’s been watching him all of these years and never noticed all of these things until now.


End file.
